$16 Million Verdict for Mother Restrained During Delivery After Hospital Advertised Natural Birth

Caroline Malatesta had delivered her first three children at St. Vincent's Hospital, each time with standard labor and delivery care. When she became pregnant with her fourth child, she chose Brookwood Medical Center instead, drawn by a marketing campaign the hospital was running across television, magazines, and the internet. The ads promised a mother's choice in how she delivered: individual birthing plans, freedom of movement during labor, even the option of a water birth.

The delivery she got in March 2012 looked nothing like the ads. According to the family's account at trial, nurses restrained her, at times forcibly, and required her to labor flat on her back rather than on her hands and knees as she had requested. A nurse applied pressure to the baby's head to try to delay the delivery. Caroline had no say in any of it. It was, as her lawyers put it, the nurses' way or no way.

Her son was born healthy. Caroline was not. She was later diagnosed with pudendal neuralgia, a nerve injury that causes chronic pelvic pain, described at trial as catastrophic and permanent, and largely invisible to anyone who did not know to look for it. It has affected her ability to work, to be physically active, and to care for her family the way she had before.

The Malatestas sued Brookwood for two things at once: ordinary medical negligence in how the nurses handled the delivery, and fraud, on the theory that the hospital's advertising was not just marketing puffery but a specific factual representation about the choice and autonomy a laboring mother would have, one Brookwood did not deliver on and, the family argued, did not intend to deliver on. That second claim was what made the case unusual. It meant the jury was not just weighing whether the nursing care fell below a medical standard, but whether the hospital had made a promise to prospective patients that it broke by design, treating the promise of a natural birth as a lure rather than a real option.

David Marsh and Rip Andrews of Marsh, Rickard & Bryan represented the Malatestas in Jefferson County Circuit Court. After a two-week trial, the jury deliberated for nine hours before returning its verdict on the evening of August 5, 2016: $10 million in compensatory damages for the injury itself, $5 million in punitive damages tied specifically to the fraud finding, and $1 million to J.T. Malatesta for loss of consortium, for a total of $16 million.

After the verdict, Rip Andrews said the jury had sent a message beyond this one hospital: when a hospital advertises to potential patients, he said, it has to tell the whole truth and nothing but the truth. A Brookwood vice president said the hospital respectfully disagreed with the verdict.